Dalma's Menu

About Dalma

Dalma Heyn, MSW, LMSW, is the bestselling author of two books on women in intimate relationships (The Erotic Silence of the American Wife and Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives) and one on dating (Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy), available from Open Road Media in e-book format. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Health Magazine, Executive Editor of McCall’s, and columnist for Mademoiselle (“The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex”) and New Woman (“Smart Sex”). Having written widely on love, culture and travel, she has appeared both as author and social observer on such shows as Oprah!, The Today Show, Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show, The View, and Good Morning America.

Now that the 2012 election is nearing and potential candidates who have committed ethics slip-ups are trying to get vetted by, say, the tea party, it’s fun to see the Righteousness Crew do their thing. There’s Newt Gingrich, toying with running, explaining away his adultery (not to mention his divorces) by citing Patriotism as his justification (If you love your country enough, how can you be asked to be faithful to a mere mortal?). At least G.O.P. senator John Ensign had the decency to resign today, and not put us all through that tortuous game of moral fact-twisting. It’s actually fun to watch the Righteousness Crew at work; religious conservatives so often present themselves as so very holy. But let’s get real: Let me point out what the facts say, now and for as long as I’ve been studying this (which is about 25 years) about Who Cheats and Who Doesn’t. Continue Reading →

What if you knew that you’d lost half a million dollars because someone didn’t pay you your fair share of your salary? What would be your next step?

I just spoke with 15 young women in their twenties about pay inequality. What do you think, I asked, when you realize that women get less than men for the same job? They looked at me with that wry “What else is new?” look I’ve become familiar with when discussing issues that are as deep in our culture as the minerals in our bones. It’s a bored look, like “How lame is that?”…but it’s not an outraged look. Continue Reading →

An eighth-grade girl in my town, 13-year-old Alye Pollack, recently released an anti-bullying video on YouTube—called “Words are Worse than Sticks and Stones”–that has gotten over 200,000 hits.

Everyone wonders how young people learn to be such bullies, and I’m going suggest one way. Bullying is now de rigeur among older people, and it appears everywhere in the media. Just listen to this note from New York Magazine, asking me to renew my subscription. Keep in mind that I don’t owe them a dime—this is a request, not an invoice. It begins with a faux “Office of the Controller” letterhead.

Men say young women are demanding as hell—about money, about sex, about everything. So how come their mothers aren’t?

At age 58, a woman tells me she lives with her lover in her home, not his, and is reluctant to ask him to contribute to her—now, their–bills. “He buys us beautiful dinners,” she explains when I ask her what’s stopping her from discussing this, and from confronting him about the sizable mortgage and living expenses she knows they should be sharing. “He gets us tickets to wonderful concerts; pays for our vacations. We started out that way and, well, it hasn’t been that long….” she trails off.

Are women waiting to get married? Are they defying the custom we believe to be truth–snaring reluctant bachelors into wedlock? Are they now the ones saying, Not Yet? Yes. Long thought to be the ones pushing those balky bachelors, women are no longer doing so.

For years I’ve been hearing about the “delay” in marriage insisted on by many women, who are simply not as eager as they once were to be wives. For one thing, these young women have greater resources. For another, they don’t have the time, nor feel as inclined as they once might have, to put their all into intimate relationships. As one 23-year-old guest on my local television show, “The Love Goddess Show,” put it, “I don’t want to be the one in charge of maintaining relationship. I’m too busy. So right now, I’m lying low.”

A reader reminds me that, in my blogs about the Power of the Least Interested, I forgot to speak about how the phenomenon plays out in long-term relationships. Does the least interested maintain power over the more interested partner, once romantic attraction moves into love?

Not for very long. The usual set-up years ago was the familiar eager-to-please woman endlessly trying to engage her distracted, disengaged, or plainly disinterested husband. Her heartbreaking, losing techniques: Asking questions. Repeating questions. Attempting to be seductive, funny, young, pretty. (Just saying these in print makes me mad and remind me of all those magazine articles: “Ten Surefire Ways to Make Him Happy!” and all those songs about how to please, win back and stand by that cheatin’ guy.) One study showing that husbands and wives speak to one another an average of 13 minutes a week (and then, only because they have to arrange childcare and meal issues) says it all: Interest in one’s partner is at risk over time. And if that partner happens to be a woman, well, poor dear. Continue Reading →

On my last television show–a cable-access show in Connecticut called The Love Goddess Show–I had two guests, a woman and a man, Louise and Tracy, opposites in every way except that they’re both past middle age and both single. Louise is busy with her career, refuses to go online to date, and wouldn’t make”dating,” per se, a priority if her life depended upon it. If she meets someone, great. If not, great too.

Tracy, at 60, is divorced, and like so many recently divorced men, wants to be involved again asap. He works alone. He is, by his own admission, needy–not in the way women have been accused (read: too needy), but just in need of a solid, sexually exclusive relationship. It’s what he wants and he says so. He goes online to meet women and hopes not to date them all but to find one to be with. Oh, and he likes women to be as assertive as he is–in fact, maybe more. This is not a man afraid of women’s assertiveness, aggressiveness, anger. Continue Reading →

Why do we suddenly love experts who scream at their quivering audiences? What is it in us that wants the Glenn Beck experience with our self-improvement?

Who made it fashionable among advice-givers to shriek? Was it Dr. Phil, whose relationship tips are shouted out so roughly to troubled couples? Was it Jim Cramer of “Mad Money,” ridiculing his audience for not investing his (often disastrous) way? Judge Judy, whose wisdom on the bench increasingly became over the years slicing and dicing the plaintiff? (Granted, that plaintiff is usually odious.) Or Jillian Michaels, hollering at the obese on “The Biggest Loser”? Suddenly, tyranny is cool and verbal abuse, a promising recovery technique.

“You wouldn’t like the weight-loss guru Jillian Michaels when she’s angry,” reads the blurb under a piece entitled “THE FIGHTER” in today’s New York Times Magazine, accompanied by a smirking Michaels. Continue Reading →

Women of all ages tell me that they want evolved relationships with enlightened men, men who know that developing intimacy skills is part of the job of being a 21st century guy. And I ask these 21st century women, “Okay, cool, but who are you in this? Are you playing the role of a 20th century woman?”

The story of intimacy in college dorms reveals that the new paradigm of hooking up–which was supposed to free women to make sexual choices without waiting for a commitment, or even a relationship–has some really tired old baggage. It’s still men who decide whom to see again after the inital hook-up. It’s still men who earn a cool-guy reputation for hooking up a lot, and yes, it’s still women who are called “sluts” for doing the same.

About Dalma

Dalma Heyn is a psychotherapist, consultant, and a passionate speaker on the evolution of women's issues and new trends in love, marriage and relationships. Her work has been called "revolutionary" for investigating the deepest places in our culture and our psyches, and for telling the truth about women’s experience by reporting their own words-- rather than reporting on how women are interpreted or judged.

Dalma is the author of several New York Times bestselling books, including The Erotic Silence of The American Wife, Marriage Shock: The Transformation of Women into Wives; Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy, and most recently, A Godsend: A Love Story For Grownups, written with her husband Richard Marek. Learn more about Dalma